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Comment by fluidcruft | Hacker News Reader

There's a third camp between these extremes who is like "goddamn it just type this shit out for me so I don't have to do it myself".

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Definitely the space I'm in, where I know exactly what I need, exactly how to implement it, just saves time typing 100s of lines.

If you’re typing 100s of lines, you’re already doing it wrong. My most used operation is completion, just before copy-paste. The reason I like vim is that it makes such operation so fast. And the reason I like emacs is that it has superpowered version of those operations.

Yes, the third camp and probably the most effective is to do a decent amount of writing yourself and use the LLMs as codegen machines, but where the DSL is natural language. Deepseek v4 flash is an incredible model for this, you can actually get into flow state as you write code and then delegate boring code to the magic autocompletion machine to autocomplete.

The better workflow, and I think the one adopted by people in the second group, is to take a step back from coding, do a bit of thinking about the domain, design a better abstraction for the problem (architecture, data structure, algorithms), and then write the small amount of code you probably need.

Code should grow according to need, not for its own sake. Start small, use it in the real world, and then improve it.

I agree with that, but there still is some code that eventually needs to be written and there is a subset of that code which can be generated. I think it depends on the domain as well - for example, UI code is trivially generatable by LLMs.

RAD tools like Delphi, qt creator, glade, Android Studio, Xcode’s Interface builder,… have always make it trivial to generate UI code. And there’s libraries for other concerns.

The majority of a project code are written at the beginning or when a major feature is introduced. The daily work is mostly tweaking. And you can’t tweak without a good understanding of the module.

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